Report: 60 Percent Of Child Porn Websites Are Located In Europe

According to a recent report by the Internet Watch Foundation, the majority, about 60 percent, of the child pornography websites are located on European servers.

The recently conducted report of the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) also showed a dramatic increase in child sex abuse images. This fact raises a concern for law enforcement authorities across the world to combat this rising epidemic. According to the IWF, the rise in the abusive images can be explained by the cybercriminals ability to conceal their identity better than before. The annual report of the charity showed that the number of websites hosting sexually explicit images of minors increased by 20 percent in 2016 to the number of 2,416.

The Internet Watch Foundation monitors for images and videos containing the sexual abuse of children. The Cambridgeshire based charity seeks “to minimize the availability of ‘potentially criminal’ internet content, specifically images of child sexual abuse (including child pornography) hosted anywhere, and criminally obscene adult content in the United Kingdom.” The IWF also searched for content inciting racial hatred, however, since a law enforcement website was setup to monitor such websites in 2011, the charity’s main task is to eliminate child pornographic content from the world wide web. The Foundation, however, identified an issue, stating that new internet addresses are offering criminals more places to hide the illicit material.

According to the current annual research of the IWF, new web domains, such as .london, are increasingly being used for the distribution of indecent and sexual material containing children. The researchers claimed that there was a 258 percent increase in the number of times, the charity had to take action against such sites last year. As the number of child pornographic sites has increased, the balance of where they’re located has shifted from the United States to Europe, the IWF reported. The majority of sites, 60 percent, are located in Europe compared to the 37 percent in the US. The Internet Watch Foundation research showed that law enforcement authorities in the United Kingdom are leading the fight against online child abuse. The IWF stated that only a small percent of child porn websites are located in the UK, and British authorities are swiftly reacting to any report where users are flagging indecent images of underaged children.

“Only 0.1 percent of the content was hosted in the UK,” Sarah Smith, technical researcher at the IWF, said in a statement. “That’s because of the great partnerships we have with law enforcement and industry here. The content is taken down incredibly quickly once we’ve spoken to our police partners at the National Crime Agency. Speed is of the essence here because those images are of children being sexually abused.”

Since law enforcement authorities all around the world turned a massive focus on taking down indecent content of children from the internet, the criminals started using more sophisticated methods to hide their activities from the police. The IWF reported that the number of illicit websites disguised as legitimate ones has doubled from 2015 to 2016.

“They use this technique called ‘disguised websites’ to hide content and make it more difficult to take it down,” said Smith. “This lets them get access to things like payment processing services, which is something we’re concerned about.”

“We must never forget that there is a victim behind every child sexual abuse image, and every time these horrific pictures are viewed a child is re-abused. Anyone who wilfully seeks out this material is complicit in fuelling this appalling industry,” responding to the news, a spokesman for the NSPCC, a United Kingdom-based charity focusing on children, said in a statement. “To stamp out this crime altogether we must tackle the escalating demand for child abuse material by finding out what deters offenders and potential offenders from viewing child sexual abuse images.”

From the 60 percent of abusive websites in Europe, the Netherlands stands the first, hosting 37 percent (20,972) sites containing child pornographic content. The two other countries where the most illicit content is located is France with 11 percent and Russia, standing with seven percent.

DEMI KESELAMATAN KITA

Report: 60 Percent Of Child Porn Websites Are Located In Europe
Reviewed by KAMAR CISA
on
May 10, 2017
Rating: 5